For camera systems in which a camera images a dead angle in the surroundings of a vehicle and the picked up image is displayed on a display screen inside the car, methods of displaying a picked up image with various screen designs are being studied so that a driver can instinctively understand a sense of direction and a sense of distance on the picked up image displayed on the display screen.
In one of those screen designs, a mask image is superimposed on part of a picked up image so that that part of the picked up image is not displayed on a display screen. When an imaging element inside a camera receives high-luminance light such as the sun or a headlight of an oncoming vehicle, this type of screen design can prevent the light reflected on a picked up image from being displayed on a display screen by the mask image.
Typically, when an imaging element receives high-luminance light, an image of the light is reflected and a smear occurs due to that light on its picked up image. The mask image only hides the image of the light and cannot hide the smear due to the light in the screen design mentioned above. Thus when an area corresponding to the mask image in the imaging element receives high-luminance light, the display screen displays a strange image where the image of the high-luminance light is not reflected but only the smear has occurred.
The above camera systems have another disadvantage of reflecting a ghost or stray light on a picked up image when the imaging element receives external light from outside the angle of view.